Paris, France

Psychoanalysis

Psychanalyse

Master's
Language: FrenchStudies in French
Qualification: M2
duration: 2 years
University website: www.univ-paris8.fr/
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques related to the study of the unconscious mind, which together form a method of treatment for mental-health disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud and stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others.
Psychoanalysis
[Freud’s psychology] turned out to be psychology without the psyche, i.e., without the soul. Freud just did not give a satisfying account of all the things we experience. Everything higher had to be a repression of something lower, and a symbol of something else rather than itself. … Aristotle said that man has two peaks, each accompanied by intense pleasure: sexual intercourse and thinking. … Freud saw only one focus in the soul, the same one as the brutes have, and had to explain all psychology’s higher phenomena by society’s repression or other such versions of the Indian rope trick.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), pp. 136-137
Psychoanalysis
The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.
Erich Fromm "Psychoanalyse und Soziologie" (1929); published as "Psychoanalysis and Sociology" as translated by Mark Ritter, in Critical Theory and Society : A Reader (1989) edited by S. E. Bronner and D. M. Kellner
Psychoanalysis
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.
Terry Eagleton (2011) Literary Theory: An Introduction. p. 147
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